The Year 2019: As The Last Sun Sets

I started writing these year-end reviews starting last year. I really enjoyed writing it and got some great feedback from friends and family. Thank you, everyone. You can read it over here. Continuing the tradition, here’s my recap of 2019:

Things That Didn’t Work

Community Service

I kick-started 2019 by moving to my hometown and starting a new job. The Job is doing pretty good. I had plenty of free time during weekends which I wanted to dedicate to my community, so I stared a free programming course at a local community center. I’m still not sure if it was the place, because the course was free or maybe it was me. The course was a total disaster.

Machine Learning

I challenged myself to get hands-on with Machine Learning. I even purchased learning material spent time to learn but turned out its way difficult than I expected. So that didn’t work as well.

Health

I have been getting severe migraines on and off, for the past few years now. This year was the worst for my health so far thanks to migraines. Once the migraine kicks in, it can last up to days, four days was the maximum streak I got this year. I can’t explain how unbearable and unbearably painful it is. trust me its one’s worst nightmare.

I totally failed to manage my migraines this year.

Writing

In terms of writing, 2018 was a great year. I still get feedback from one of my most-read and well-received articles. This year, I managed to write only one article and that’s pretty bizarre for someone who claims to be a writer or a blogger. I’m truly ashamed that I didn’t write more in 2019.

Things That Worked

Freelancing

I can say this year was a good year for freelancing for me because I managed to complete a couple of projects. I’m looking forward for more in 2020.

Side Projects

This year I open-sourced a Laravel package. I developed this project back in 2018 and kept it secret. I did use it in my side projects to help me with repetitive CRUD generation tasks though. More on that in the Open Source Contribution section.

I’m still working on a couple of secret side projects some of them may be for wealth generation and some for FOSS.

Open Source Contribution

Laravel CRUD Scaffold is basically Laravel’s make commands on steroids. It’s a pretty opinionated package which generates models, controllers, views, form requests, migrations, and even factories by just passing in a model name.

Please give it a try and if you like it do Star it to show your love. You can check it out here. On a side note, as of writing this, I’m working on to rename the project to a bit easy to remember and easy to type name and also writing tests for it to make it more reliable.

This year I also managed to contribute to Laravel ecosystem. It was a meager one-liner pull request but regardless of the size of the contribution, it made me really happy and proud from inside.

Self Improvement

This year I tried to be a bit better of a human than I was in 2018. Next year I’ll try to be even better.

Social Media Fasting

This year I reduced my social media usage. Especially, I stopped using Facebook and Instagram. I shared way fewer statuses on WhatsApp than the previous year. But on the contrary, my Twitter, Youtube, Dev.to and StackOverflow usage increased. And I’m pretty happy with the improvement.

I'm going to observe Social Media Fasting for a month to focus on things that matter more than social media.

Automation

Okay, the heading is misleading since it is about organizing and version-controlling my dotfiles. I had heard a lot of developers talking about dotfiles and how they benefit them. I did’t pay attention until I saw this tweet from Laracasts:

A brand new series launches today on Laracasts! I've invited a number of guests to, one teacher per episode, teach you what you they know best. First up is @driesvints' review of managing dotfiles. https://t.co/tUEYOaa2Yl

Even though I created all my bash scripts from scratch on my own but this video definitely gave me the motivation I needed. I wrote about how I created my dotfiles in this article. I have a sense of relief after organizing my dotfiles files. Now the process of keeping them synced is automated and they are safely stored in a GitHub private repo. I commit any changes I make on a regular basis.

The Journey Ahead

For 2020, I’m keeping my expectations a bit low and I will try to improve upon a few things from 2019 plus I’ll focus on improving my Testing skills using TDD, as much as I possibly can.

So, that will be all for my year-end review. Wish you a very Happy and a Prosperous New Year!

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